


Of Wolves and Dragons

by dreforall



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Multi, Sexual Content, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 02:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/681842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreforall/pseuds/dreforall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't sex and it wasn't love; it was fate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Wolves and Dragons

**Author's Note:**

> My very first fanfic, ever <3 No betas, no nothing. I'm stabbing in the dark here people.

The first time I saw him I loved him.

I’d gone to the stables to get away from the bustle of the castle. I did not know who he was, though certainly I had heard of him, everyone had. Outlandish descriptions and sighing maidens do not reliable knowledge make, however, even if it made perfect sense when it came to him as he was the heir to the throne and a notorious, bright one at that, for his accomplishments. Yet I didn’t know it was he; perhaps I was so distracted by the sight of him that it never occurred to me to question.

I always loved riding and so it wasn’t unusual for me to seek solace among the horses. It was something of a running joke with my brothers, that I preferred horses to my lady duties and even to them, and as all jokes it had a grain of truth in it. I’d rather feel the smell of hay and horse than the perfumes and powders of the ladies at court, even in the North, where the people – including the women – were far more frugal.

He was talking to the horses, not the baby talk men often indulge when near their animals, but an actual conversation. Of course horses are not good conversationalists (even if, amazingly, they seemed to pay attention to him, the great black stallion’s nose brushing its master’s shoulder as if in understanding, or so my young mind perceived it), but the way he spoke, bouncing ideas off their silence, the low, constant murmur of his voice speaking things I could barely comprehend in lilting High Valyrian, that caught me as surely as a fishhook through the heart would have.

From time to time he would bury his fingers through the black stallion’s mane, lean closer through the stall door and back again. If he saw me, and I was almost sure he had, he did not acknowledge me.

I saddled my horse in silence and in silence I left, with the echo of his words behind me.

I knew then that I would never love a man who did not talk to his horses like he did.

 

*

 

The second time I saw him was at a welcoming feast, the great feast offered to the newcomers and one I had to attend, however much I did not like it: I felt strangled by my gown even with the low neckline I wore, suffocated by the elaborate choker around my neck, and I’d refused to do my hair the way southern women were prone to, letting it fall wild across my shoulders the way it was meant to be. It felt hot against my back, in such weather, and that only helped to make me more and more irritable as the feast wore on. 

It was there that I met my betrothed, Robert Baratheon, and it was there that I lost him.

When Ned presented me to his best friend (and my intended, our marriage arranged by my brother, as was proper), Robert, I instantly liked him. I know history will say otherwise, but I did. He was easy to laugh, bursting with bravado and the boisterousness of a young soldier, and yes, he was a handsome indeed with his dark beard and merry eyes. Perhaps under other circumstances I would have loved him; Ned seemed to believe so. He believed I was the perfect match for him, because – in his eyes – I was strong as only a northern woman can be and beautiful enough to keep his love and his lust in my bed. We both knew Robert to be a philanderer, but – so Ned believed – he was young and strong as a bull and he needed a wife to rein him in, he needed his match, and I was to be that match.

Perhaps it was true; perhaps it would have been the perfect match, strength to strength, as my brother believed. Perhaps it would have happened. I would not regret or woe his marriage bed.

Perhaps it would have happened, if not for the violet eyes of the designated heir of the Seven Kingdoms…

Rhaegar Targaryen welcomed us with grace and propriety, as was his wont, and I watched him as he sat beside his wife, the beautiful Dornish princess he’d been sold to as we of noble blood often are. She loved him; there was scarcely a man or a woman who did not love Rhaegar Targaryen in the kingdom. Even the smallfolk who had no great love for their lords and ladies loved Rhaegar.

_I will not be one of them,_ I thought then. _I will not._

I was the greater fool.

“My lady,” he said as he bowed over my hand to brush his lips across my skin and I was never so thankful for the half-light of the Great Hall than for how it hid the way my whole skin flushed at the contact of his lips to my skin. My entire body went alive as his eyes – those damned violet eyes, such sorrow, such pain – met mine, only briefly, before he drew back with a bow and left us.

He was a man of few words, I knew from the gossip strewn across the kingdom, a man of a peculiar sort of melancholy: he was fond of the harp and of singing and of reading far more than of war and swords and lances, so unlike most young men in the kingdom. He was not known to womanize and some men would laugh and jeer at this and remark on the Connington boy, his best friend, whose eyes would never leave his prince.

(They were right, of course, at least on Jon’s side. Jon Connington had no reason to look elsewhere; who would?)

He said nothing more to me that night. He said nothing else, in fact, until…

Well. Until.

He did not need to, I realized later, when he was entreated to sing to us. He was skilled in that art, as he was skilled in everything he set his mind to, and when his voice broke the sudden silence I understood why he was so different, so strange. I could no more put what I felt then to words than I could turn the tides, but it was there, in his voice and in his song, in the way the women wept, even I, though far more discreetly than most ladies.

I, Lyanna Stark, cried for a dragon prince’s song.

(Benjen learned his lesson when I tipped wine over his head. One did not tease a direwolf.)

That was when I learned Rhaegar was not one of us. He had never been and I suspected he would never be and when his eyes met mine across the room and never left throughout the music he played and the small half-smile he wore, I knew it. I knew that I would never marry Robert Baratheon, that everything – there was no choice there, none at all.

My brother’s eyes, Brandon’s eyes, burned me; Howland Reed’s felt thoughtful, but sorrowful.

I shivered.

 

*

 

The tournament night, after everything fell apart, Brandon’s knuckles paled as he grasped my arm and held on to me – we had no skill in seeing the future, but I knew, and he knew. He commanded me to my quarters, taking his role as head of the family, and I obeyed in silence, for once, quite unlike my usual defiance. Brandon was young and generous and a rake, the wild wolf, but he was never weak and when he needed to be the heir of House Stark, he was, without a doubt or a second thought, and I obeyed.

It was far too late in the night when I heard the door open and woke half-afraid, half-excited, sheets wound tight around me, preserving a modesty I did not feel. I was not surprised to find him there, watching me from the door, the guards at my door – I did not even care, what had happened to them. They were not dead, this I knew; it was not his style to simply murder people like that.

Or perhaps it was. I never knew.

I did not care. I did not even think.

“Your Grace?” I said because I thought it was proper; I knew, however, and so did he, and I did not move from my bed. Not when he climbed on it, silent as a ghost, not when he loosened his breeches, not when I helped him out of his clothes until his skin met mine – my night shift discarded somewhere between a breath and another, my legs falling open of their own volition. His hands felt rough against my thighs as he lifted them around his waist, his palms dry and warm and I did not know why I expected them to be soft as a woman’s, when he was a warrior and a good one at that.

He never said a word. He did not need to.

It was not love we made that night. It was not even sex. Those words are too simple to describe what happened then, they are too imprecise to explain what transpired that night in the guest chamber I had taken for mine while we stayed at Harrenhal. I had never believed in fate, but that – in retrospect – there was no other explanation for it, for the way I screamed when he split me open and healed me all at once, the way he drank my moans and my whimpers, his mouth on mine.

It was the mating of dragons, the mating of wolves, as animalistic, as natural and overwhelming and inevitable as the turn of the seasons and the coming of winter, the way he bit my shoulder until he drew blood, the way my nails scratched at his back, drawing him closer to me, impossibly close, until there was only sweat and heat between us.

And still we did not say a word that was not a moan, a sigh, a groan, not as we mated and not after, him stretched beside me, drenched in sweat and panting, my heart beating fast in my chest, my soul soaring in a high of pleasure and pain and a desire so strong I could scarcely breathe for the weight of it inside me.

The next morning I woke to meet his eyes already open, watching me; he ran a finger down my cheek, down to my lips, and I bit him. He smiled, and said my name – my first name, unadorned, no titles, no family, because between us these things did not matter.

He told me of the prophecy, of the why hidden behind his actions, and I understood it, the sense of inevitability I felt with him, the way he laid his cheek on my chest opened such a wellspring of feeling inside me, something I never even knew was possible, let alone with him.

“We leave for Dorne,” he said, and I did not question. It would be pointless to do so. I knew we would. I would have followed him to the ends of the world.

I did.

 

*

 

They said he abducted me, that he raped me and stole me away, that he was as mad as his father and just as cruel. I know they said that and worse still. It made sense: I was an honorable woman, they said, a proud woman, and I was.

What they did not see, and how could they, was that I saw no dishonor in what we did, in how we stole in the night like thieves, just the two of us, stopping in the morning to hide, traveling by night, where we would be less conspicuous, just a man and a woman, mating under the moon and the stars, anonymous, just two travelers, perhaps husband and wife, perhaps not.

Perhaps if we were peasants, had he not been married to his Dornish wife, we would have been wed and I would have sat by his side when he ruled and borne his heirs from my womb and our lineage would spread throughout the ages, princes and kings and princesses and queens and knights and ladies. Perhaps things would have ended differently then.

That was not what happened.

 

*

 

His wife welcomed me as a sister; it surprised me at first, for we northerners are a proud lot, and wound on strict laws of honor, laws I broke as thoroughly as if they never existed. The Dornish, however, were different. Their honor was tempered in heat, not in cold. We talked and gossiped and soon, we were friends, better than friends. We would talk about him, about politics, about the weight of the rebellion escalating throughout the kingdoms, led by my intended and my brother.

It was brief, our stay in King’s Landing, but it was enough. We talked about him – the man who ruled our lives, our mate. We shared a bed; we shared plans of living in Dorne, the three of us, as the conquerors once did. We shared him when he returned from his affairs of state, sometimes, and sometimes she would writhe against me and kiss my lips and my breasts and my neck as he took me and kissed me and caressed me from behind. I would watch and kiss her lips and her breasts and caress her, without a trace of jealousy, as he took her, too.

Elia was young, and fragile too, sickly, to my – and his – sorrow. She understood, as I did, how little choice we had. She understood the reasons, the motives, and believed them just as I did. Or rather, did not believe: the three of us, we _knew_.

This was not mere sex, or lust, or even something half so trivial as love, the way I’d first believed.

We moved like puppets, powerless, and made joy and delight in what was given to us.

I would play with her children, smile at them and take care of them; I missed them, the little children and their mother, when we departed for Dorne, the Tower of Joy.

I was sent to a tower, our nest, only days before my brother came to claim me back.

(I am so sorry, Brandon, so sorry… ah, father, I did not mean it, I didn’t…)

He would sing to me, to the child in my womb. I would tell him, “we are breeding a little snow cub,” for that was what we named the bastards of the North, _snow,_ and he would say, “no.”

He would say that wolf as I was born, I had a dragon’s son in me; and that our son would be a dragon, greater than any that had come before.

I believed him, brother, father, my kingdom, my home, my honor – I believed him.

 

*

 

It was Robert who slayed him. He was in love with me, so they said, and my abduction and rape had broken something inside his mind: he raged like the bull he resembled, his easy laughter gone, his boisterous energy dedicated to destroying they who made my disgrace possible. _Ours is the fury,_ and Robert’s was a force to be reckoned with.

If only he knew then – but he did not, could not know. Perhaps I should have gone back, perhaps I should have never followed him in the first place, perhaps I should have screamed and thrown him out that night, perhaps I should not have believed him, seen it for madness, the way his own father was mad; perhaps, however, did not happen.

Father, brother, my people, my world, I did not regret a single thing.

I did not cry or scream in pain and rage when news of his death came to me. I sat by the window of my home, my prison, my nest, held a hand over the spot where our son shifted restlessly, and mourned, not for him, but for Robert and Ned, for Brandon and my father and all the people destroyed in the wake of us.

 

*

 

“Promise me, Ned,”

It was then that I cried, knowing my protectors dead, meeting Howland Reed’s sorrowful eyes. He knew, too. I knew that he did. Maybe he did not understand, but he knew. His people had green dreams, after all, did they not?

Did you ever dream of this, Howland, good friend I never knew?

Promise me that you will protect my son, that you will not begrudge him, that you will not hate him for his mother and his father. Our son, our dragonet, our wolf cub, oh, my son, I am so sorry that I will not be there to hold you and protect you myself. I wish I could live to see you grow, my handsome son, my love, my Targaryen prince, my promised one, my Dragonlord, my –

There is darkness before me. The scent of blood is strong. Fever-hot brightness, roses. I know I will die. This was not lust, not love, not even the raw, passionate desire of man and woman. This was the mating of dragons and of wolves, and I am not sorry. I cannot be sorry.

This is fate; perhaps something worse.

I think of the sun, of fire, of the scent of blood oranges and the hum of fat, lazy bees, the scent of winter roses.

Ash and smoke, blood and fire, salt –

I fall.


End file.
